The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

Intelligence in Recent Public Literature

Once upon a
time, serious and well-meaning people believed communism to be the wave of the
future. They thought that only scientific socialism could build just societies
in which the arts and the intellect could flourish; that the Soviet Union was
the place where the future existed today; and that the avuncular Josef Stalin
was the only true opponent of fascism in all its capitalist and warmongering
forms.

Once upon a
time, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a world-wide covert action campaign
to counter such nonsense in societies in which communism might take hold.
Almost every CIA station had case officers dedicated to working with labor
unions, intellectuals, youth and student organizations, journalists, veterans,
women’s groups, and more. The Agency dealt directly with foreign
representatives of these groups, but it also subsidized their activities
indirectly by laundering funds through allied organizations based in the United
States. In short, the Agency’s covert political action depended on the
anti-communist zeal of private American citizens, only a few of whom knew that
the overseas works of their ostensibly independent organizations were financed
by the CIA until the campaign’s cover was disastrously blown in 1967.

British
historian Hugh Wilford has just given us the best history of the covert
political action campaign to date. Wilford is now associate professor of
history at California State University (Long Beach), but before arriving there
he spent years in pursuit of the documentation that he sensed had to exist in
the organizational remains of the groups that the Agency had funded. His work
brought him metaphorically to my door at the CIA History Staff, as the
truth-in-reviewing code obliges me acknowledge. Full disclosure also bids me
say that I wrote on the covert action campaign in a still-classified monograph
published by CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence in 1999.

Where I had
viewed the CIA’s campaign from the inside looking out, Wilford’s new book The
Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America does the job from the outside
in. Wilford exploits contemporary public accounts, memoirs, and, most
important, the remaining files of the various private groups involved. The Mighty
Wurlitzer surpasses early attempts like Peter Coleman’s The Liberal
Conspiracy (1989) and Frances Stonor Saunders’ Cultural Cold War
(2000). [1]The former book had examined only one organization, the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, and took a congratulatory tone that was disliked by some reviewers.
The latter cast a wider net and surveyed a congeries of cultural, artistic, and
intellectual groups, but its conspiracy-mongering style undermined its
judgments.

Unlike these
efforts, Wilford writes, he provides “the first comprehensive account of the
CIA’s covert network from its creation in the late 1940s to its exposure 20
years later, encompassing all the main American citizen groups involved in
front operations.” He adds that he set out to portray “the relationship between
the CIA and its client organizations in as complete and rounded a manner as
possible” given his lack of access to CIA files: “My hope is that, by telling
both sides of the story, the groups’ as well as the CIA’s, I will shed new
light not only on the U.S. government’s conduct of the Cold War, but also on
American society and culture in the mid-twentieth century.” [10]. On both of
these scores, Wilford does better than the earlier works.

The Mighty
Wurlitzer
succeeds at its first goal of presenting as comprehensive a survey as can be
expected without access to CIA files. In doing so, Wilford has surely saved a
wealth of detail from oblivion. He located and studied the yellowing archives
of mostly forgotten organizations like the National Student Association, the
American Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Committees of Correspondence, and
the Family Rosary Crusade. Few historians work as hard as he did to capture the
fading memories of a private America in the age just before cheap copy machines.
His method frequently uncovered details that no longer exist in the CIA’s
official memory, such as the personal ties between early CIA officials and the
officers of American voluntary organizations that would soon receive Agency
subsidies.

Wilford falls
short, however, in his second aim for The Mighty Wurlitzer, that of
explaining both sides of the relationship between the Agency and its private
clients. Despite his careful research, he did not explore all available sources
and avenues. For example, Wilford spoke with very few veterans, whether former
Agency employees or officers of the relevant front groups. Doing so would have
added texture to his tale, particularly with regard to the inter-personal
dynamics inside and outside the CIA that played such large roles in these
operations. Wilford’s choice of incidents, groups, and individuals to discuss,
moreover, makes for a rather choppy narrative. The Mighty Wurlitzer
jumps from episode to episode and group to group, detailing each in turn but
leaving the reader wondering about the connections between them. This is not a
glaring flaw and it is more than compensated for by Wilford’s larger insight.
Though he does not quite succeed in showing the Agency’s side of the story, he
still gets one big point right.

Here it might
help the reader to understand that the insinuating sub-title of this book is a
bit of a misnomer. My complaint may not be with Wilford at all but rather with
his publishers at Harvard; “How the CIA Played America” sounds like something
coined in a marketing office. Wilford explains the title derived from a 1950s
quip by CIA operational chief Frank Wisner, who reportedly spoke of his
directorate’s complex of front organizations as a “mighty Wurlitzer”; a big
theater organ “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.”[7] Wilford
does not claim the CIA “played” America, in the sense of duping gullible
presidents or Congresses for the purpose of pursuing its own foreign policies.
Instead, he means to say that the CIA used Americans, indeed, the whole
country, as instruments in a mission that for two decades had bipartisan
support in this nation: the goal of demonstrating to communism’s adherents and
a candid world the multifarious variety and hence the superiority of liberal
democracy.

This point was
made well in a declassified CIA History Staff study of DCI Allen Dulles that
Wilford might not have seen. (Absence of a bibliography in The Mighty
Wurlitzer makes it hard to be certain.) In discussing CIA’s covert
political action campaign, the study explained that it had survived so long
because presidents and key Congressmen held “a fairly sophisticated point of
view” that understood that “the public exhibition of unorthodox views was a
potent weapon against monolithic communist uniformity of action.” The CIA
subsidized freedom in order to expose the lies of tyrants—and then winced
silently when that freedom led to an occasional bite on America’s hand.

Wilford grasps
this point, and adds another. When the CIA played America like a mighty Wurlitzer,
he argues, “U.S. citizens at first followed the Agency's score, [but] then
began improvising their own tunes, eventually turning harmony into
cacophony.”[10] In that, The Mighty Wurlitzer is certainly correct.
Wilford has explained for an academic audience what CIA case officers learned
the hard way in the early Cold War. Covert political action always requires
willing partners, and they almost always work two agendas at once: that of the
intelligence agency that subsidizes them, and that of their own faction within
the private organization or movement they represent. “Who co-opted whom?” was a
little joke whispered by former officers of the National Student Association
once they joined CIA to run Covert Action Staff’s Branch 5—and thus took over
the youth and student field in the Agency’s larger campaign.

Why is this
important? Because scholars and graduate students will someday follow Wilford’s
lead. His judicious approach should set the standard for their studies. Second,
it matters because some quarters inside and outside government argue today that
America needs to replicate the successes of the CIA’s covert political action
campaign for the Global War on Terror. The Mighty Wurlitzer might not
convince them that that’s a bad idea, but Wilford’s observations should give
them pause to consider the risks and unintended consequences of projects that
they are unlikely to be be able to control completely.

[i]The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress of Cultural
Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989); Cultural Cold War:
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000).

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